Ask for an Omen

Now, comes the question of whether you're doing the right thing. Much of the time, it's very likely that you're going to be able to determine this by your gut feeling. And your gut feeling is very fundamentally an indication that you are aligned with the prana, not only your own prana, but the prana in your environment. The better you are aligned with prana, the easier it's going to be for you to feel like you're moving in the right direction. One of the Sanskrit words for a road is marga, and that marga comes from the word mrga, which means the forest animal, in particular a deer.

So when an animal moves through the forest, creates a path, if you've ever followed the path of an animal through the forest, you will notice it follows the contours of the trees and the rocks and so on, but it also follows the currents of the prana. If you're sensitive, you can feel that the prana, the chi is moving in a particular way. Chi never moves in a straight line, or when it does move in a straight line, there tends to be something artificial about it. We chi tends to move in a curvaceous kind of way, and forest animal paths move in a curvaceous kind of way, and we will often find our own selves moving in a curvaceous kind of way, not straight ahead, full speed, like a train running down a track headed towards nirvana, but rather moving in this direction a little, moving in that direction a little, but still aimed ultimately towards our goal. Much of the time, God willing, you will be able to get into this alignment with the prana and have the prana indicate to you what you should be doing and whether you're doing things rightly or not so rightly.

One challenge occurs when, in fact, this is not so obvious, even when you are well aligned with your prana, even when you are able to feel yourself moving well through the world. Sometimes things are complex enough or big enough or peculiar enough or in the shadows sufficiently that it's not so obvious, and in this case, you may want to request the universe to provide you with some information. Sometimes this is called an omen. When one studies jyotisha, it's sometimes called Indian astrology, really it's a system of divination developed in India. There are a number of different methods, including studying the horoscopes and reading the palm, but a very fundamental method is what's called nimitta or the science of omenology, reading the book of nature, understanding what's happening and how things that are happening outside may be reflecting in some way or another the reality of your own self.

Identifying an omen is something that is often easy and often, sometimes even more often, not so easy. It's very easy for people once they hear the concept of omen to think that everything becomes an omen and they start to interpret everything and that's a guarantee that you will end up very likely being unable to interpret anything. This also has to be held very carefully and you have to respect the fact that the universe is not going to talk to you like a human being will talk to you. It's going to provide you a situation for you to perceive and you will have to interpret that situation. So you don't want to make this too complicated.

If you're asking the universe a question, it should be a yes-no question. It should not be an essay question because you're not going to understand what the universe is going to write in response to that. Keep your question, if you have a question, very clear and then wait patiently for the answer to come to you. Sometimes it may come immediately and when it does, this is very convenient because you have the question and something happens unusual, it needs to be unusual if it's the thing that happens all the time that is less meaningful than something that is not expected that happens at the moment that you become aware of a question that you sincerely want to answer. If you have idle questions, questions that are motivated out of curiousness, curiosity is not going to benefit you in this context because the universe is very busy.

Mother Nature has a lot on her plate and she doesn't have time to wander around trying to give you something to do and keep you amused and keep you entertained. You can go to the internet for that, instead only go to the cosmos when you have something serious of moment that you are obligated in some way to deal with and you want a sincere answer to a sincere question. The ways in which these answers may come are quite varied. They might come in a dream or a vision. They might come by the first thing that you see or think of when you arise in the morning.

It might be the first thing that you see or think of or smell or hear or taste when you walk out the door first thing in the morning. There are many different potential events that can act as omens but not all of them are omens, just because something happens that is unusual does not necessarily mean that you need to stop everything you are doing and pay close attention to it. It may just be something unusual but when for example, and this would not happen nowadays because there are almost no vultures left in India, but when I was in India and I saw a wedding procession being led by a vulture walking on the ground, this was something extremely unusual and it was impossible for me not to think that this marriage might have some serious problems happening to it in the future because a vulture is the symbol of the ominous and very totipotent planet Saturn and Saturn represents disappointment, dissatisfaction, disagreement and things falling apart, death. So maybe not the death of the people involved but perhaps the death of the relationship in some way. So that certainly has been the only time I have ever seen that and that to me was a very noteworthy omen, even though I was not asking for it, it was presented to me at that time possibly just so I could see the ways in which nature can provide information and there are many, many ways that people can access this level of information from the universe and certainly all the forms of divination, as I mentioned, the palmistry and horoscopy and using a pendulum and so on.

I personally, because I am a person who writes books and reads a lot of books, I often find that if I align myself and simply open a book and I need to have some useful information, I will find something on that page that's useful. It's also the case that this may provide something else. Sometimes if I need to find a mistake in a book, I will align my prawn and then open it to a mistake. When the world starts to cooperate with you as long as you behave properly, the world is always going to behave properly with you as long as you behave properly with it. So as long as you behave properly with the world, you will find some method or another that the world will find most useful for its communication with you, which may be useful for it communicating with somebody else and may not be.

The important thing is the relationship between you and the cosmos because this is what you're trying to work on and what you're trying to develop. The purpose of tantra is not so much to be focusing on the details of your ordinary mundane quotidian life. The purpose of tantra is to try to be opening yourself to something different. Part of that is to be establishing a relationship between you and the cosmos as you transform your own personality, that relationship will transform also. But it's interesting to have ways of communicating so that you can find out the degree to which that transformation is working in a positive way.

Identifying an omen is often much easier than interpreting the omen. So it's very, very, very important, even if you get to the place where you can identify omens easily, not to grab hold of the omen and think that you understand exactly what it's saying. Hold these events that are noteworthy in a very relaxed and careful kind of way. If you had a hummingbird that was sitting on your palm, you wouldn't grab hold of the thing like that. It would either die or try to fly away.

Instead, let your palm be very calm, let the hummingbird come and sit there quietly. You in it can then commune without trying to grasp, without trying to over-interpret, being very light and being very reasonable and being very open and free with it. So when you're trying, this applies to anything in the context of your attempt to understand whether you're moving in the right direction or not. This is a valuable way of trying to figure it out. Using omens as a valuable way of trying to figure it out.

Sometimes it's not so much an omen as the providence will speak to you through someone else's mouth. It may be someone you don't know. It may be somebody that you know but have no good opinion of. But at any moment, through any method, including another human being who may not even know what they're saying, providence can come and give you information that's useful to you. So you need to be alert at all times.

If you insist that providence should only speak to you in a particular way, then you're always going to have difficulty. If you insist that you will only accept information if it is delivered to you in the way that you expect, then you can expect that you're not going to get useful information delivered to you. Always wait patiently. Allow the information to come to you. Do not try to go out and grab hold of it.

Allow things to come to you. Do not over interpret. Make sure that you align yourself and, again, use the gut, the intuition to test whether your interpretation is accurate or not. If you don't over interpret, if you don't jump to conclusions, if you sit with it until you feel like you have really got a good general idea of what is going on with whatever information is being provided to you, then you can be relatively confident that you are going to have interpreted properly and that it's going to give you a beneficial indication as to whether you are or are not moving in the right direction and doing the right thing.